Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations

ISBN-13: 9780195317138 / Angielski / Twarda / 2007 / 280 str.

David Lewin

Opis

David Lewin's Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations is recognized as the seminal work paving the way for current studies in mathematical and systematic approaches to music analysis. Lewin, one of the 20th century's most prominent figures in music theory, pushes the boundaries of the study of pitch-structure beyond its conception as a static system for classifying and inter-relating chords and sets. Known by most music theorists as "GMIT," the book is by far the most significant contribution to the field of systematic music theory in the last half-century, generating the framework for the "transformational theory" movement. Appearing almost twenty years after GMIT's initial publication, this Oxford University Press edition features a previously unpublished preface by David Lewin, as well as a foreword by Edward Gollin contextualizing the work's significance for the current field of music theory.

Recenzje

"While David Lewin's thought had been animated for decades by some of these books' ideas—-the complex significance of interval, the audibility of pitch-class inversional indices, the definition of directed motion more by context than convention—-it was their concentrated presentation here that enabled many readers to assimilate them as a 'theory.' The result was a shift in the discipline's conception of its methods, even its goals, to the point where imitation of the books (of their imitable aspects) could become a career path. In a renewed encounter with the originals, we are confronted once more by Lewin's intellectual probity, his intense concern with every construction's relation to hearing (which need not mean anything so simple as that every construction is heard), his fastidious eschewal of hype. With these taken as exemplary, the field would change again."—Joseph Dubiel, Professor of Music, Columbia University